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Culture is a central concept broadly studied in social anthropology and sociology. It has been gaining increasing attention in economics, appearing in research on labor market discrimination, identity, gender, and social preferences. Most experimental economics research on culture studies cross-national or cross-ethnic differences in economic behavior. In contrast, we explain laboratory behavior using two cultural dimensions adopted from a prominent general cultural framework in contemporary social anthropology: group commitment and grid control. Groupness measures the extent to which individual identity is incorporated into group or collective identity; gridness measures the extent to which social and political prescriptions intrinsically influence individual behavior. Grid-group characteristics are measured for each individual using selected items from the World Values Survey. We hypothesize that these attributes allow us to systematically predict behavior in a way that discriminates among multiple forms of social preferences using a simple, parsimonious deductive model. The theoretical predictions are further tested in the economics laboratory by applying them to the dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. We find that these predictions are confirmed overall for most experimental games, although the strength of empirical support varies across games. We conclude that grid-group cultural theory is a viable predictor of people’s economic behavior, then discuss potential limitations of the current approach and ways to improve it.

Therapeutic communities (TCs) assume that residents are capable of working together to overcome substance abuse and criminal behavior. Economic games allow us to study the potential of cooperative behavior in TC residents. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors analyze results from a sample of 85 corrections-based TC residents and a comparison group of 45 individuals drawn from the general population who participated in five well-known economic experiments – the dictator game, the ultimatum game, the trust game, risk attitude elicitation and time preference elicitation.

TC residents keep less money in the dictator game and return more in the trust game, and prefer short-term rewards in the time preference elicitation. In the ultimatum game, nearly half of all residents refuse offers that are either too low or too high.

While the study involves a sample from one TC and a comparison group, the results suggest that residents are at least comparable to the general public in generosity and appear willing on average to repay trust. A substantial minority may have difficulty accepting help.

Rapid peer feedback is of value. Residents will be willing to offer help to peers. The TC environment may explain residents’ tendency to return money in the trust game. Residents who refuse to accept offers that are either too low or too high in the ultimatum game may also have difficulty in accepting help from peers.

Economic games may help to clarify guidelines for TC clinical practice.

This is the first use of economic games with TC residents.

The logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness have long been central to understanding behavior in organizations. However, scholarly work on the logic of appropriateness has consisted mostly of conceptual clarification and ex post explanation of observed behavior. In an effort to facilitate the study of the logic of appropriateness through experimental methods, this paper introduces an experimental paradigm that allows for the manipulation of decision logic as an independent variable. Using this paradigm, 710 participants played four iconic behavioral games in which profitability and ethics are both at play and, sometimes, at odds: Prisoners’ Dilemma, Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, and Trust Game. The manipulation generated behavioral data, as well as qualitative data about participants’ considerations while deciding according to each logic. The behavioral data show that, compared to participants employing a logic of consequences, participants employing a logic of appropriateness rejected more unfair offers in an Ultimatum Game and were more generous when reciprocating trusting behavior in a Trust Game. In all other cases, behavior between the two logics was not significantly different. An analysis of the qualitative data suggests that a logic of consequences increased participants’ focus on monetary concerns, whereas a logic of appropriateness increased participants’ focus on moral concerns. Taken together, these data provide new insights into when, how, and why the two logics result in behavioral and cognitive differences. The authors conclude by considering directions for future research that they see as particularly amenable to study using the experimental manipulation presented here.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the decision‐making implications of “regrets of the heart” versus “regrets of the head” in economic decision making.

The phenomenon in three empirical studies is examined. Study 1 is a protocol analysis of people's “regrets of the heart” and “regrets of the head”. Study 2 uses the same recall prompt and examined decision makers' choices in an ultimatum bargaining game. Study 3 tests regrets of heart versus the head in an interactive face to face negotiation setting.

Overall, it is found that people who were prompted to recall a time in which they regretted “not following their heart” were more likely to recall situations in which they experienced a loss or lost opportunity compared to people who recalled a time when they regretted “not following their head”. Recalling a regret of the heart prompts decision makers and negotiators to put a greater value on maintaining relationships and avoid loss in an interpersonal exchange situation.

These findings contribute to the literature on how emotions affect economic decision making and provide a more nuanced examination of regret.

Focusing on “regrets of the head” may lead to greater economic gains in economic decisions.

This article examines a different type of regret and demonstrates how this type of regret impacts economic decision‐making behavior.

This paper suggests to combine different kind of “other-regarding” preferences as an approach to fair behavior which is observed in controlled experiments. We assert that participants in two-person experiments have a good will capital which may be described by altruistic preferences. These preferences guide a large fraction of participants when they have to make distributional choices in one-stage games. We further show that in games with more than one stage the previous action of the other person may cause reciprocal feelings in addition to the altruistic preferences. A friendly (unfriedly) act of the other person may increase (decrease) the good will capital of the participants. Upon these findings, we conclude that a combination of altruism and reciprocity is able to describe the variety of behavior in several experiments despite their differing strategic context.

To investigate the external validity of Ultimatum and Dictator game behavior we conduct experiments in field settings with naturally occurring variation in “social framing.” Our participants are students at Middlebury College, non-traditional students at Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC), and employees at a Kansas City distribution center. Ultimatum game offers are ordered: KCKCC > employee > Middlebury. In the Dictator game employees are more generous than students in either location. Workers behaved distinctly from both student groups in that their allocations do not decrease between games, an effect we attribute to the social framing of the workplace.

This experiment analyzes multi-offer versions of the signaling and screening litigation games, as well as a bilateral multi-offer litigation game. A plaintiff has either a low or a high claim on an uninformed defendant, and the two negotiate in an attempt to reach a pre-trial settlement. Trial is costly, and settlement generates surplus over which the two parties can bargain. In the signaling game, the defendant has the power to make the offer, while the plaintiff makes the offer in the screening game. Previous experiments on single-offer games find that disputes occur even when offers contain surplus not predicted under the theory, and fairness appears to be important in explaining deviations from theory. This research examines whether renegotiation in the form of successive sequential offers can yield efficiency gains via lower dispute rates. There are four main findings. One, under the one-sided multi-offer structure the excess dispute rate is 23 percentage-points lower in the screening game, and the high-offer dispute rate is 31 percentage-points lower in signaling game. The bilateral game yields an additional 15 percentage-point reduction in the high-offer dispute rate, but excess disputes persist. Two, in these games, proposers take advantage of the multi-offer opportunity and make around three to four offers per negotiation. Three, across games the surplus in a fair offer remains constant at about one-sixth of the surplus, but the empirical benchmark from which this is measured varies according to which player has the power to make the offer. In the one-sided games, the benchmark is the respective zero-surplus endpoint, but in the bilateral game the benchmark is the surplus midpoint. Fourth, dynamic behavior plays an important but complex role in observed outcomes. Multi-offer mechanisms may be alternatives to costly information transmission mechanisms like disclosure or discovery.

Most hypotheses proposed to explain human food sharing address motives, yet most tests of these hypotheses have measured only the patterns of food transfer. To choose between these hypotheses we need to measure people’s propensity to share. To do that, I played two games (the Ultimatum and Dictator Games) with Hadza hunter-gatherers. Despite their ubiquitous food sharing, the Hadza are less willing to share in these games than people in complex societies are. They were also less willing to share in smaller camps than larger camps. I evaluate the various food-sharing hypotheses in light of these results.

The results of standard lab experiments have long been questioned because of the convenience samples of subjects they typically employ and the abstract nature of the lab settings. These two characteristics of experimental economics, it is argued, are the key factors that endanger the external validity of experiments.

Researchers have tried to address these issues by bringing the lab to non-traditional subjects including participants in remote locations, and/or by moving the setting of experiments closer to reality by using real goods and/or settings that are not stripped of context.

While field experiments might help experimental economists to increase the external validity of their investigations, these potential benefits might come at costs that can be considerable. Specifically, going into the field can dramatically increase the demands on, and challenges to, experimental control. This is particularly true for experiments in small-scale societies in remote locations on which I focus in this article.